Tech

How 4 Cities Are Deploying High-Tech Bike Sharing Programs

The Global Innovation Series is supported by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment. It delivers more than purpose-built electric vehicles — it delivers smart mobility services. Visit bmw-i.com or follow @BMWi on Twitter.

Cities around the world are at various stages of bike sharing initiatives, offering membership-based systems for short-term rentals of bikes to get around urban areas. From San Francisco to Toronto and London to Melbourne, these programs incorporate high-tech features to manage and monitor thousands of bikes.

Most of the bike programs operate in similar ways:

Stations are placed in strategic locations and consist of a kiosk with docks — the kiosk contains software running the system. Each dock holds a single bike. Each station can hold one or several docks, depending on space restraints and demand.

Users subscribe to service plans in varying increments of time to gain access to bikes in the system. Each city offers independent plans and fees.

Here’s a closer look at some of the programs and technology bringing more efficiency to the massive undertaking of monitoring and managing bikes amongst thousands of city residents.

The Denver B-cycle program launched in April 2010 and claims dibs as the first large-scale municipal bike sharing system in the United States. The key organization involved in the launch of Denver B-cycle is Denver Bike Sharing, a non-profit owner and operator of the bike sharing system. Denver Bike Sharing works closely with multiple city departments and agencies to ensure the success of the program, and multiple private businesses have become sponsors of Denver B-cycle.

The pilot for the current bike program was initiated during the Democratic National Convention as Denver’s “Freewheelin’” program — 1,000 bikes were distributed to visitors and residents for use during the convention. Afterward, the Denver 2008 Convention Host Committee contributed $1 million to Denver Bike Sharing from the convention's surplus money to benefit the city’s residents and visitors.

The B-cycle program now runs with 500 bikes, and members can access more than 350 miles of bike paths and trails in addition to traversing the city. To obtain a bike, users walk directly to the B-cycle they want to ride, press a button and tap their B-cycle card — a bike is released within 3 to 8 seconds. Access to the system starts at $5 for 24 hours, $20 for 7 days, and $30 for 30 days; annual membership is $65. If a biker picks up and returns their bicycle to any station within 30 minutes, no additional usage fees apply since short trips are largely the intention for the program.

Denver’s program incorporates technology and renewable energy with:

21 solar-powered stations

RFID chips embedded in every B-card

Wireless technology for communication between the stations and a central server

GPS in the bikes

An iPhone app called “Bcycle" created by Amadeus Consulting, which lets users check real-time B-station status, including the number of bikes and open docks at nearby stations

According to Ben Turner of Denver Bike Sharing, the program has been successful. Annual memberships rose from 1,807 members in 2010 to more than 2000 so far in 2011. Short-term memberships went from 32,922 in 2010 to 15,351 to date putting them on track to at least matching, if not surpassing, last year’s numbers. In 2010, there were 102,981 B-cycle rides. Just over halfway into 2011, there have been 73,863 rides.

Montreal’s Bixi bike sharing system launched in May 2009 with more than 1,000 bikes — it claims to be North America’s first large-scale bike-share program. The program has expanded to 5,050 bicycles at more than 400 bike stations, most recently adding the city of Westmount to their coverage area. More than 40,000 Montrealers are members, and since the start of the program, they’ve logged 5 million trips, 1.5 million of which have taken place since April 15, 2011. The Montreal program includes stations both downtown and in more residential areas reaching commuters.

The company behind the program’s bikes, stations and technology is Montreal-based Public Bike System Company (PBSC) using the brand name Bixi (“bike” plus “taxi”). PBSC also runs similar programs in Toronto, Melbourne, London, Washington D.C., Minneapolis, Ottawa, and on the Washington State University campus for students. A program in Boston is launching soon. Initially, the quick assembly and mobility of the stations was critical for Montreal to facilitate removal of the stations during heavy winter snows, but cities deploying the system today benefit from easy installation with no need for construction.

The Toronto Bixi Bike Program launched on May 3, 2011, with 1,000 bikes, 80 BIXI stations and 1,500 docking points. PBCS has worked closely with the city's transportation agency since being awarded the contract to install the system into the city’s downtown core. In the short time since the program’s launch, it has garnered more than 2,000 members and logged 100,000 trips.

The Bixi systems are modular and portable, running off solar power and battery. When a system isn’t being used for an extended period of time, it goes into sleep mode until the next user touches the screen to wake up the station. This feature ensures there is enough energy to power each station throughout the day, and there is also a power management system monitoring each station’s power.

Because PBCS has opened some of their data for public use, other companies have developed mobile apps to help users find Bixi bike stations and check bike availability in any of the cities where they’re located. One of the more popular apps is SpotCycle for Android and iPhone.

Users can purchase a subscription plan, set up their accounts on their respective city-specific Bixi website, connect their credit card securely to their account, and monitor their usage at any time. All trips 30 minutes and under are included in their subscription. Additional fees are applied to trips over 30 minutes. Members are mailed a plastic “key” with an RFID chip that is read by inserting the key into a slot on any Bixi station.

One bike-sharing program that has been a long time coming is in the Bay Area. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) is planning for a pilot bike-sharing program that will run along the San Francisco Peninsula, which includes the cities of San Jose, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City and San Francisco County. The service will be focused on the Caltrain corridor (Caltrain is the commuter rail for the San Francisco Peninsula). A request for proposals will go out this summer, and the plan is to award a contract to a vendor in the Fall of 2011. The initial goal is to deploy 1,000 shared-use bicycles at up to 100 kiosks by spring 2012 — 500 of those are to be in San Francisco proper.

Heath Maddox, senior planner for the Livable Streets Subdivision of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), says the defining characteristics of the service they’ve outlined in an RFP draft is that the bike system be solar-powered with no need for external AC power and no requirement for excavation that would turn the installation process into a construction project. The portability of stations and docks vastly simplifies environmental review based on the California Environmental Quality Act, Maddox explains.

“As a planner, one of the interesting things about this project is that there will be a lot of data about how bikes are being used,” says Maddox, referring to not just the retrieving of and returning of bikes, but also where the bikes actually are being ridden. “It would tell us where the high demand corridors are, and we could plan network improvements accordingly, not just for users of the bicycle program but for anybody riding a bike in the area.”

In San Francisco, the stations will be concentrated within a roughly two-mile square area in the city’s core where the Caltrain line, Transbay bus terminal, BART stations and ferries converge. Along the Caltrain line outside San Francisco, the places suitable for bike sharing are limited due to much smaller downtown areas with a focus on local Caltrain stations. Maddox anticipates many more people using the bikes independent of transit in San Francisco, while use in other downtown areas may be limited to people living or working close to the Caltrain stations.

Maddox, who first experienced bike-sharing programs in Europe more than 10 years ago, says the technology then was much simpler. Copenhagen, an early leader in bike sharing, employed nominal deposit locks where a user inserted coins to unlock a bike and could only retrieve their coins once the bike was properly returned to a docking station. Today’s ultra-modern systems integrate RFID and cellular communications, solar power, GPS and mobile apps, taking bike sharing to a whole new level.

Series Supported by BMW i

The Global Innovation Series is supported by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment. It delivers more than purpose-built electric vehicles; it delivers smart mobility services within and beyond the car. Visit bmw-i.com or follow @BMWi on Twitter.

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